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47 million yr old fossil could shed light on origins of man

"Its really a kind of Rosetta Stone because it ties together parts we haven't been able to associate before." "This fossil will probably be the one that will be pictured in all textbooks for the next hundred years." "In the moment this finding is published, it will be just like an asteroid hitting the earth." -quotes from related video
spoco2says...

I can though *promote.

It's easy to be skeptical, as it all seems too good to be true... but Attenborough, that's some serious cred having him weigh in.

So... I guess we can say "Suck it creationists"

EDDsays...

I love how each year we unearth (pardon the pun) more evidence confirming evolution.
*doublepromote

"She could also question religion itself."
Unfortunately creationist nutjobs have been exposed to lots and lots of scientific proof that are in direct conflict with their "beliefs", and they're still being bats*it insane, so I don't think this will help in that department, really. Instead I'm happy for the advance it will provide for real science and in understanding the evolution of our species.

Numinarsays...

Holy crap that looks fake! So perfect! Well, if these experts turn out to be actual, factual experts then awesome! Attenborough could have been taken out of context... no... this is just HUGE!

A million is not much money for this... the collector must have had a pang of guilt at what he was withholding from the world. Or he was really stupid.

robbersdog49says...

I wasn't aware that Darwinian evolution needed confirming. This piece is interesting as it applies to us, but to say that we need this to confirm Darwin's theory of evolution is just ridiculous. Proof abounds for evolution and this just adds to it. Evolution would still be fact without it.

Sir David Attenborough certainly knows his stuff regarding fossils and would be a very hard person to fool, so it seems this is what it claims to be which is great, and a very interesting specimen.

BicycleRepairMansays...

I'll repeat what I've said elsewhere, This find has now almost been ruined by the overenthusiastic discoverers. Yes its a beautifully preserved fossil, yes it's plausible that its an early primate, yes, its an important find that helps us understand evolution better.

But this is NOT "the missing link" and its NOT "The link" These are simplistic slogans design to spark the interest of the public, but that ends up being a severe dumbing down of the subject, and in the end just make it easier to misunderstand evolution, and thus give creationists an easier time.

The term "missing link" is not only an irrelevant and outdated term from the time Darwin first discovered evolution by natural selection, but it even refers to a completely different transition, and thus a different era in evolution.

When Charles Darwin wrote "The Descent Of Man" he basically described what he had left out of "Origin": Humans and their role in evolution. Darwin used comparative anatomy and geographic distribution and other things to support the idea that we evolved from ancestors that we share with other apes. The idea was that, some time ago, our ancestors would look much more "ape-like" to us. They'd probably look alot like chimps to us, though, of course they wouldnt BE chimps, but the ancestor of chimps as well as our ancestors.

Earlier ancestors again would look more like monkeys to us, like "Ida", and even earlier ones would look lemur-like and so on.

The point is, that even tho the evidence Darwin had was very good, we hadnt actually found the "half-human" fossils just yet, the kind that might or might not be bi-pedal, that had bigger brains than chimps, but smaller brains than us, the kind that had more hair than us, but less than other apes, and so on, it is this transition, "from ape to man*" that is meant by a "missing link"

Today we have found many of these "missing links" and its obvious to scientists, as it probably was to Darwin as well, that there is no "one missing link" but a scattered mess of our ancestors relatives, that are more often than not cousins of the "human line" in the tree of life.

Ida is one of many "links" but she's much further back in time, she's probably quite closely related to the ancestor of ALL primates, not just humans, and that's in many respects just as exciting as later, hominid (big brain, bipedal, hairless) evolution, some would say even more exciting, but these simplistic terms does not make it more exciting, just dumber.

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